Guy Zyskind writes: On Tuesday, a pair of bitcoin entrepreneurs and the MIT Media Lab revealed a prototype for a system called Enigma, designed to achieve a decades-old goal in data security known as “homomorphic” encryption: A way to encrypt data such that it can be shared with a third party and used in computations without it ever being decrypted. That mathematical trick—which would allow untrusted computers to accurately run computations on sensitive data without putting the data at risk of hacker breaches or surveillance—has only become more urgent in an age when millions of users constantly share their secrets with cloud services ranging from Amazon and Dropbox to Google and Facebook. Now, with bitcoin’s tricks in their arsenal, Enigma’s creators say they can now pull off homomorphically encrypted computations more efficiently than ever.

An anonymous reader writes: Local trout farmers in the Bavarian town of Eching, north of Munich, have taken the developer group e-shelter to court over a proposed data center which is to be cooled using surrounding groundwater. The local groundwater will be used to cool the center, before the heated water is returned back into the ground. A pretty ecological-sounding solution one would think, but perhaps not when the tampered water will filter directly into a fish farm’s fresh springs, located just a few kilometers east of the proposed site. The farmers at the ‘Forellenhof Nadler’ farm are highly concerned that the environmental impact of the data center will harm the health of their fish and threaten their economic livelihood, with even a temperature increase of two degrees inducing a higher risk of disease.

ozmanjusri writes: The Australian Communications and Media Authority has published detailed statistics of malware infections identified by their online security team (AISI). The team scans and identifies and compromised computers on Australian IP addresses and reports daily to around 130 participating ISPs.

Their breakdown shows about infected 16,500 devices are online at any one time. The malware type for all infections is available on the site.

An anonymous reader writes: The Canadian government is expected to pass copyright reform next week.
The bill's anti-circumvention rules are a mirror image of the DMCA,
leading many to conclude that the government simply caved to U.S. led
lobbying pressure. Now Michael Geist provides the
evidence — a secret series of unreported meetings between MPAA head
Christopher Dodd and Canada's foreign minister, heritage minister, and
a senior industry official, just weeks after the bill was introduced
and days before SOPA landed in the U.S.

alphadogg writes: Linux developers will soon have a chance to compete for prizes of laptops and smartphones, thanks to Canonical's announcement this week of the Ubuntu App Showdown contest. Developers will have from June 18 until July 9 — a total of three weeks — to create an app using Canonical's Quickly development tool, which combines Python and GTK into a single Ubuntu-centric package. The resulting apps will be judged by a five-member panel, with the developers of the top three receiving new Nokia N9 smartphones.

beaverdownunder writes: In an effort to combat fraudulent claims lodged within its Centrelink welfare-payment agency, the Australian Government has asked auction-site eBay to name all Aussies who sold more than $20,000 worth of goods in the last year.

Should someone be found to have been doing such a high-volume of business on eBay while claiming Centrelink benefits but not declaring that income, they could potentially face prosecution.

However, the president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, Terry O'Gorman, says this action is a gross invasion of privacy.

"What we say should happen is that if police have probable cause for investigating someone, they go to a magistrate, they get a warrant and they access that person's eBay records that way," he said.

An anonymous reader writes: I was intrigued by the new flexible DTV antennas coming out. My old flat, rigid antenna worked well when placed in a window but it was hard to keep it there and it blocked light. I had success with other DIY antennas so I attempted to build my own flexible, transparent DTV antenna out of paper, plastic and aluminum foil using a fractal antenna pattern. It works very well in the UHF range.

Orome1 writes: Concerns about data security and privacy are impacting what people buy and which companies they do business with, according to a new study. Concerns about data security and privacy are not merely theoretical. Around the world, people feel that their personal information is not adequately protected and that companies are unchecked, so it's no surprise that they are now taking data security and privacy considerations into account when they shop. The study reveals that 70% of people are more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago and 68% feel they have lost control over how their information is shared and used by businesses. These concerns are impacting their decisions at the checkout counter. Individuals are even weighing considerations about security and privacy as heavily as those relating to a product's design, style, and physical dimensions.

suso writes: "A design flaw in the VTE library was published yesterday. The VTE library, which is part of the GNOME project, provides the terminal widget and manages the scrollback buffer used in many popular terminal emulators including gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, terminator and guake. Due to this flaw, your scrollback buffer ends up on your/tmp filesystem over time and can be viewed by anyone who gets ahold of your hard drive. Including data passed back through an SSH connection. A demonstration video was also made to make the problem more obvious. Anyone using these terminals or others based on libvte should be aware of this issue. Any administrator who has users who connect to services using one of these terminals will also be affected. Instructions are also included in the report for how to properly deal with the leaked data on your hard drive. You are encouraged to switch terminals or start using tmpfs for your/tmp partition until the library is fixed."

mikejuk writes: A Lithuanian company has a prototype security system based on a Kinect that indicates how we might interact with the cash dispensers of the future. Instead of having to go through an elaborate authentication procedure involving passwords and pins you simply stand in front of the machine and say a few words. The voice, face and body recognition software do the rest. It is just like the old days when you walked into a bank and were recognized as a regular customer.With Kinect being so cheap there is no reason why this couldn't be built into cash machines and become a standard security method.The next question is — how to spoof it? Perhaps this is what 3D printers were invented for?

techeric writes: Critical UK emergency services' communications systems could be seriously disrupted by hackers or terrorists owing to the adoption of low-cost Software Defined Radio (SDR). The warning comes from security consultancy Digital Assurance.The weakness lies in the adoption of SDR systems, which translate hardware-based circuitry into software implementations, which are being widely incorporated in comms radio systems, like GSM, DECT, and WiMax.“If you look at SDR, you have one side listening to the air, and one side connected to the Internet,” said Greg Jones, director at Digital Assurance, speaking to TechWeek Europe. “Take London as an example. If a hacker had his SDR connected to the Internet, he could (with a few of his friends) carry out a DDoS attack against some really critical infrastructure. For example, the location of the transmitters for the emergency services in London are available on the Ofcom Website giving a hacker [or terrorist] the potential to bring a critical comms system to its knees in minutes.”

dataxtream writes: Censorship is becoming the flavour of 2012. After PIPA, SOPA, and Megaupload, last Friday at 1400 BST, PressTV, the news channel the US and Britsh governments dont want you to watch, was removed from UK's SKY Satellite Platform in a blatant act of censorship. A Wikileak described the US government requesting the UK government to shut down PressTV — and the UK dutifully complied. Strangely, the Murdoch Media still continues to operate in the UK despite the Hacking Scandal, and multiple payoffs to celebrities for hacking into their voicemail, sometimes with the collusion of the UK Police. George Galloway, former Member of Parliament, and of Senate fame, weighs in with his characteristic bluntess. The light at the end of the censorship tunnel is that in a few years, Web TV will begin to be commonplace so that banning of channels on satellite platforms or terrestrial airwaves will be irrelevant.

harrymcc writes: "For all the ongoing controversy over software piracy--and the passionate arguments on both sides--one point is rarely discussed. That's the fact that only piracy has ensured that software from the past has survived for historians to experience it. And with app stores and aggressive DRM becoming the default state of affairs, programs will disappear from memory even more quickly unless pirates preserve them for future generations. Over at Technologizer, historian Benj Edwards makes the case for piracy as a protector of our cultural legacy."

An anonymous reader writes: Terrahertz waves, or T-waves as they’re frequently known, may make portable medical scanners a reality. Scientists at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) recently published a paper in the journal Nature Photonics that detailed a new way of creating T-waves that is not only more reliable than existing methods, but smaller too.

The new technology manages to shrink the production down significantly, while letting a beam of T-rays be focused and powerful. That means that, for the first time, you could put a full body scanner onto the palm of your hand.